Three days later they laid him down by his wife.
Until then Helen scarcely left him. And not once did her pitiful young calm break or waver.
Stephen came from London. Latham’s telephone message had reached Pont Street before Pryde had.
No word came of Hugh, no word or sign from him.
They laid him in his coffin almost as they found him. Helen insisted that it be so. Much that when dead we usually owe to strange hands, to professional kindliness, the girl, who had not seen death before, did for this dead.
The blackdraped trestle, the casket on it, was placed in the room where the tragedy that had killed him had fallen.
He lay as if he slept, all the pain and doubt gone from his still face. Only one flower was with him—just one in his hand. And in the other hand he still held the odd Chinese carving. Helen had intended the costly trifle he had so affected—so often handled—it seemed almost a part of him—to remain with him. But, at last, something, some new vagary of Grief’s many piteous, puzzling vagaries, impelled her to take it from him.
She scarcely left him all the hours he lay in his favorite room and took there his last homekeeping, there where he had lived so much of his life, done so much of his thinking, welcomed such few friends as he valued, read again and again the books he liked.
He rested with Helen’s picture, radiant, gay-clad, smiling down on him serene and immovable, and Helen black-clad, pallid, almost as quiet,—moving only to do him some new little service, to give him still one more caress.
It was their last tryst—kept tenderly in the old room where they had kept so many. Such trysts are not for chronicling.
At the last—alone for the “good-by” that must be given—but never to be quite ended or done, live she as long as she may—Helen unclenched the cold—oh! so cold—fingers, and drew away the bit of jade.
Sobbing—she had scarcely cried until now—she carried it to the writing-table, and put it just where it had always stood.
“I want it, Daddy,” she said, smiling down wet-eyed on the still face. “You don’t know how much you handled it. I seem always to have seen it in your hand. No one shall touch it again but me—just yours and mine, Daddy—our little jade doll, in a pink cradle. Stay there!” she told the joss, and then sobbing, but pressing back her tears, and wiping them away when theywouldcome, that her sight might be clear for its last loving of that dear, dead face, she bent over the coffin, spending their last hour together, saying—good-by.
“Oh, Daddy—my Daddy——” The sobs came then, long and louder. Latham, watching in the hall, heard them, but he did not go to the girl; nor let any one else do so.
BOOK III
THE QUEST
The spring waxed into radiant molten summer, mocking with its lush of flower-life, its trill of bird-voice, its downpouring of sunshine, the agony of the nations, and the pitiful grief in one English girl’s inconsolable heart.
Other girls lost their lovers. Never a home in England but held some bereavement now, never a heart in Christendom but nursed some ache. But most of the sorrow and suffering was ennobled and blazoned. Other girls walked proud with their memories—hisD.S.O. pinned in their black, the ribbon ofhisMilitary Cross worn on their heart, tiny wings of tinsel, of gold, or of diamonds rising and falling with their breath, a regimental badge pinning their lace, a sailor’s button warm at a soft white throat—telling of a “boy” sleeping cold, unafraid in the North Sea, or (proudest of all these) a new wedding-ring under a little black glove—and, perhaps——
Other girls packed weekly boxes for Ruhleben, or walked the London streets and the Sussex lanes with the man on whose arm they had used to lean leaning on theirs, blinded, a leg gone, or trembling still from shell-shock, a face mutilated, broken and scarred in body, nerve-wrecked, buthers, hers to have and to hold, to love and to mother, to lean on her love, to respond to her shy wooing, to beget her children; to show the world, and God, how English women love.
But she—Helen—was alone. No field-card for her—no last kiss at Victoria, no trophy, no hope.
Hugh had been posted as a deserter. It was some hideous mistake, Helen knew that, but the world did not know. Hugh! Hugh dishonored, despised. She knew that he had not deserted. But what had happened? Had he been killed? Had his mind broken? That he had not taken his own life—at least not knowingly—that she knew. But what, what, then, had happened? He had disappeared from her, as from every one else—no trace—not a clue. Where was he? How was he? Did he live? Not a word came—not a whisper—not a hint. And his name was branded.Hername—the name she had dreamed to wear in bridal white and in motherhood. “Mrs. Hugh Pryde”—“Helen Pryde”—how often she had written those, alone in her room—as girls will. “Mrs. Hugh Pryde,” she had liked it the better of the two, and sometimes she had held it to her dimpling, flushed face before she had burned it.
For what the world thought, for what the world said, she held her young head but the higher, and went among men but the more proudly. But under her pride and her scorn her heart ached until she felt old and palsied—and some days she looked it.
She put pictures of Hugh about her rooms conspicuously. Caroline Leavitt and Stephen both wished she had not, but neither commented on it; neither dared. Angela Hilary loved her for it as she had not done before. And for it Horace Latham formed a far higher estimate of her than he had in her happier girl-days.
Spring grew to summer, summer sickened to winter. Still Hugh did not come, or send even a word. The wind whined and sneered in the leafless trees, rattling their naked branches. The snow lay cold on the ground.
A few days after her father’s funeral, Helen left Deep Dale—forever, she thought. But such servants as the war had left them there, she retained there, and there she established her “Aunt Caroline.”
Mrs. Leavitt had been well enough pleased to stay as vicereine at Deep Dale. She would have preferred to come and go with Helen; Curzon Street had its points, but Helen preferred to be alone and said so simply, brooking no dispute. If the girl had been willful before, she was adamant now. Even Stephen found it not easy to suggest or to argue, and never once when he did carried his point.
She locked up the library herself, and forbade that any should enter it in her absence. She pocketed her father’s keys, and scarcely troubled to reply to the suggestion that they might be needed by her cousin.
She had lived alone—except for her servants—in Curzon Street. At that Caroline Leavitt had protested—“so young a girl without even a figure head of a chaperon will be misunderstood”—and as much more along the same lines of social rectitude and prudence as Helen would tolerate.
Helen’s toleration was brief. “My mourning is chaperon enough,” she said curtly, “and if it isn’t, it is all I shall ever have. I wish to be alone. I intend to be.”
“No one to be with you at all—to take care of you,” Stephen had contributed once to Mrs. Leavitt’s urgency.
“No one at all, until Hugh comes home to take care of me.”
Pryde bit his lip angrily, and said no more.
Helen was her own mistress absolutely.
A will disposing of so large a fortune had not often been briefer than Richard Bransby’s, and no will had ever been clearer.
There were a few minor bequests. Caroline Leavitt was provided for handsomely, and so also were Stephen and Hugh. (The will had been signed in 1911.) To Stephen had been left the management of the vast business. Everything else—and it was more than nine-tenths of the immense estate—was Helen’s, absolutely, without condition or control. And even Stephen’s management was subject to her veto, even the legacies to others subject to her approval. She had approved, of course, at once, and the legacies were now irrevocable. But Stephen’s dictatorship she could terminate a year from the day she expressed and recorded her desire to do so, and in the meantime she could greatly curtail it. Bransby had left her heir to an autocracy. And already, in several small ways, her rule had been autocratic. Always willful, her sorrow had hardened her, and Stephen knew that when their wills clashed, hers would be maintained, no matter at what cost to him. Where she was indifferent, he could have his way absolutely. Where she was interested, he could have no part of it, unless it luckily chanced to be identical with hers. He understood, and he chafed. But also he was very careful.
He lived still in Pont Street, in the bachelor rooms he and Hugh had had since their ’Varsity days; for Bransby had liked to have Helen to himself often.
Stephen spent as much time with his cousin as she would let him, and he had from the day of his uncle’s death. And he “looked after” her as much as she would brook.
Vast as the Bransby fortune had been, even in this short time of his stewardship he had increased it by leaps and bounds. A great fortune a year ago, now it was one of the largest, if not the largest, of the war-fortunes. They still built ships and sailed them. He had suggested nothing less to Helen—he had not dared. But they dealt in aircraft too. Stephen had suggested that at a favorable moment, and she had conceded it listlessly.
Air was still his element, and its conquest his desire. His own room at Pont Street was now, as it had been all along, and as every nook of his very own when a boy had been, an ordered-litter of aeroplane models, aerodrome plans, “parts,” schemes, dreams sketched out, estimates, schedules, inventions tried and untried, lame and perfected. They knew him at the Patent Office, and at least one of his own contrivances was known and flown in both hemispheres.
For Helen’s love he still waited, hungry and denied. But his dreams of the air were fast coming true.
Helen had no comrades in these drear days, and scarcely kept up an acquaintance. Angela Hilary had refused to be “shunted,” as she termed it, and she and Horace Latham gained Helen’s odd half-hours oftener than any one else did. The girl had always “enjoyed” Angela, and when sorrow came, gifting her with some of its own wonderful clairvoyance, she had quickly sensed the worth and the tenderness of the persistent woman. And Dr. Latham was secure in her interest and liking, because she associated him closely with her father, and remembered warmly his tact and kindness in the first hours of her bereavement. And, sorry as her own plight was, and dreary as her daily life, she could not be altogether dull to the pretty contrivances and the nice management of the older girl’s love-affair. Grief itself could but find some amusement and take some warmth from Angela’s brilliant, deft handling of that difficult matter. It would have made a colder onlooker than Helen tingle—and sometimes gasp. It certainly made Latham tingle, and not infrequently gasp.
Begun half in fun, the pretty widow’s advance towards the physician had grown a little out of her own entire control, and she found herself in some danger of being hoist by her own petard. Easy enough she found it to handle the man—she had handled men from her cradle—but she found her own wild heart not quite so manageable.
Helen half expected Angela to make the proposal which Latham, the girl felt sure, never would. She was sure that Angela was in deadly earnest now, and she was confident that in love, as in frolic, Angela would stick at nothing.
And Angela was in deadly earnest now—the deadliest. But she had no intention of proposing to Horace. She knew a trick worth ten of that.
Wah-No-Tee still stood to Mrs. Hilary for friend, philosopher and guide, but, believed in as staunchly as ever, she was sought rather less frequently, and on the affair-Latham the disembodied spirit, who was also “quite a lady,” was consulted not at all. For the subjugation of the physician Angela Hilary besought no sibyl, bought no love-philter.
She lived, when in London, in a tiny private hotel, just off Bond Street, and as expensive as it was small. In her sitting-room there Latham and she were lounging close to the log-heaped fire one dark December day, exploiting an afternoon tea transatlantically heterogeneous.
“You know, I don’t approve of this at all,” the medico said, shaking his head at hot muffins heavy with butter and whipped cream, his hand hovering undecidedly over toasted marshmallows and a saline liaison of popcorn and peanuts. “We deserve to be very ill, both of us—and my country is at war, and theMorning Postsays——”
“Food-shortage! Eat less bread!” Angela gurgled, burying her white teeth in a very red peach. “Well, there’s no bread here, not a crust. And the children in the East End and badly wounded Tommies might not thrive on this fare of mine.”
“They might not,” the physician said cordially. “Yes, please, I will have two lumps and cream: my constitution requires it.”
As she poured his tea, all her rings flashing in the fire-flicker, her face, usually so white, just flushed with rose from the flecks of the flames, he fell to watching her silently.
“Talk!” she commanded.
He smiled, and said nothing.
“Oh, a penny, then, for your thoughts, Mr. Man, if you want to be bribed.”
“I wonder if I dare.”
“Be bribed? What nonsense.”
“It takes a great deal of courage sometimes. But that was not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?—if you meant anything.”
“Oh! yes—I meant.”
“What? Hurry up!”
“I meant that I wondered if I dared tell you my thoughts—what I was thinking just then.”
“H’m,” was all the help she vouchsafed him.
“Will you be angry?”
“Very like—how can I tell?”
“Shall I plunge, and find out?”
“As you like. But I don’t mind making it six-pence.”
“The fee nerves me. I was wishing I knew, and could ask without impertinence, something about your first marriage.”
“My first marriage indeed!” she cried indignantly. “How often are you pleased to imagine I have been married? I’ve only been married once, I’d have you know.”
Latham flushed hotly, and she tilted back in her chair and laughed at him openly. Then the dimpling face—her dimples were delightful—sobered, and she leaned towards the fire—brooding—her hands clasped on her knees, her foot on the fender. “I’ll tell you, then, as well as I can—why not? John was quite unlike any man you’ve known. You don’t grow such men in England. It isn’t the type. He was big, and blond and reckless—‘all wool and a yard wide.’ I loved my husband very dearly. We American women usually do. We can, you know, for we don’t often marry for any other reason. Why should we? Mr. Hilary was a lawyer—a great criminal pleader. He saved more murderers than any other one man at the Illinois bar. He was a Westerner—every bit of him. His crying was wonderful, and oh! how he bullied his juries. He made them obey him. He made every one obey him.”
“You?” Latham interjected.
“Me! Good gracious, man, American women don’t obey. Me! I wouldn’t obey Georgie Washington come to life and richer than Rothschild. Obey!” Only an American voice could express such contempt, and no British pen convey it. “But the juries obeyed him all right—as a rule! Those were good days in Chicago. There’s no place like Chicago.”
“So I’ve heard,” Latham admitted.
“But they didn’t last long. An uncle of John’s died out in California, and left us ever so many millions.”
“I say—that was sporting!”
“What was?”
“Leaving his money to you as well as to his nephew.”
“Land’s sake, but you English are funny! Of course Ira Hilary did nothing of the sort. I don’t suppose he’d ever heard of me—though he might if he read the Chicago papers; a dress or two of mine were usually in on Sunday—or something I’d done. But I dare say he didn’t even know if John had a wife. He’d gone to the Pacific coast when he was a boy, before John was born—and he’d never been back East, or even written, till he wrote he was dead. It’s like that in America.Ourmen are busy.”
“I see,” Latham asserted.
“No, you don’t. No one could who hadn’t lived there. Throw another log on.”
Latham did, and she continued, half chatting to him, half musing: “My! how it all comes back, talking about it. Well, he left us all that money, left it to me as much as if he’d said so, and very much more than he left it to John. That’s another way we have in America that you couldn’t understand if you tried; so I wouldn’t try, if I were you.”
“I won’t,” her guest said meekly. “Go on, please. I am interested.”
“Well, Uncle Ira died, and I made John retire.”
“Retire?”
“Give up the bar. And we traveled. I love to travel, I always have. And now we could afford to go anywhere and do everything. Of course I’d always had money, heaps and heaps. Papa was rich, and he left me everything. Oh! Richard Bransby wasn’t the only pebble on that beach. Gracious! we run to such fathers in America. But, of course, we’d had to live on John’s money.”
“Why?”
“Why?” she blazed at him. “Why? Why, because my money wasn’t his. He hadn’t earned it. John Hilary never had so much as a cigar out of my money. He dressed shockingly. I had to burn half the ties he bought. And his hats! But he supported me, I didn’t support him. American men don’t sponge on their wives. They wouldn’t do it. And if they would, we wouldn’t let them—not we American women. I say, Dr. Latham, you’ve a lot to learn about America—all Englishmen have.”
“Go on. Teach me some more. I like learning.”
“There’s not much more to tell. We were not together long, John and I. It was like a story my father used to tease me with, when he was tired and I teased him to tell me stories. ‘I’ll tell you a story about Jack A’Manory, and now my story’s begun. I’ll tell you another about Jack and his brother, and now my story’s done.’ I was eighteen, nearly, when I was married. It was four years after that that John said good-by to his murderers and absconders. Just a year after he died in Hong Kong—cholera. That teased me some.” The pretty lips were quivering and Latham saw a tear pearl on the long lashes.
After a pause he said gently, “Will you ever give any one else his place, do you think?”
“John’s place? Never. No one could.” She did not add that there were other places that a man—the right man—might make in her heart, and that she was lonely. But the thought was clear in her mind, and it glanced through Latham’s.
“How long is it—since you were in Hong Kong?” he ventured presently.
Angela Hilary dimpled and laughed. “I’ll be twenty-eight next week.”
“And I was forty-seven last week.” And then he added earnestly, “Thank you for telling me.”
“Oh, I was glad to.” Neither referred to her confidence about her age, or thought that the other did.
At that moment “Mr. Pryde” was announced. Angela welcomed him effusively, brewed him fresh tea and plied him with molasses candy and hot ginger-bread.
Latham watched her; it was always pleasant to watch this woman, especially when plying some womanly craft, as now, but he spoke to Stephen. “I am glad to have this chance of offering you my congratulations, Pryde.”
Stephen raised a puzzled eyebrow. “Your congratulations?”
“I hear that since you have become the head of the house of Bransby you have done great things.”
“Oh,” Stephen said non-committally.
“They tell me that you are the big man in the Aeroplane World, and that you are going to grow bigger. Perhaps success means nothing to you, but——”
“Success means everything to me, to every man worth his salt. The people who say it doesn’t are liars.”
“So, after all, you were right and Bransby was wrong.”
“Yes, I was right, and Uncle Dick was wrong. But as for my rising to great heights—well—after all, it is the house of Bransby that will reap the benefit. It was very trusting of Uncle Dick to leave me the management of the business, but Helen is the house of Bransby.”
“But surely she won’t interfere with your management,” said Latham.
And Angela cried, “Oh no, she must never do that.”
“No—she must never do that,” Pryde said, more to himself than to them, stirring his tea musingly and gazing wistfully, stubbornly into the fire. He looked up and caught Mrs. Hilary’s eye, and spoke to them both, and more lightly. “I dare say I shall find a way to persuade her to let me go on as I have.”
Their hostess sprang up with a cry. Latham just saved her cup, and an almonded eclair tumbled into the fire—past all saving. “Oh! it is lovely, perfectly lovely!”
“What?” the men both asked.
“To fly like a bird. I used to dream I was flying when I was a child. It was perfectly sweet. I used to dream it, too, sometimes when I first came out and went to Germans (cotillions, you call ’em) and things every night—oh!”
“Perhaps that came from your dancing,” Pryde said gallantly. Angela danced well.
“More probably it was the midnight supper she’d eaten,” laughed Latham, pointing a rueful professional finger at the tea-table.
“Perhaps it was both,” the hostess said cheerfully. “And my, it was beautiful. But oh, we never had supper at midnight. No fear! Two or three was nearer the hour. But such good suppers. You don’t know how to eat over here,” she added sadly. “For one thing, you simply don’t know how to cook a lobster—not one of you.”
“How should a lobster be cooked?” Pryde said lazily.
“Hot—hot—hot. Or it’s good in a mayonnaise. But who ever saw a mayonnaise in London? No one.”
“I am not greatly surprised that you dreamed at some height, if you regularly supped off lobster, Mrs. Hilary, at three in the morning, either frappé or sizzling hot,” Latham told her.
“And champagne with it,” Stephen ventured.
“Never! I detest champagne with shellfish.”
“Stout?” Pryde quizzed.
Angela made a face.
“What, then, was the beverage? If one is permitted to ask,” Stephen persisted meekly.
“Cream—when I could get it. I do love cream.”
The physician groaned. “I wonder,” he said severely, “that instead of dreaming of flying you did not in reality fly.”
She giggled, and helped herself to a macaroon, still standing on the hearthrug, facing them. “Oh, I knew a lovely poem once—we all had to learn it by heart at school—probably you did too?”
“I think it highly improbable,” Latham protested.
“I am positive I did not,” Pryde asserted.
“Not learn to recite ‘Darius Green and His Flying Machine’! My, you do neglect your children in this country. You poor things! I wonder if I can remember it and say it to you.”
She clasped her hands behind her back and faced them with dancing eyes. “‘Darius Green and His Flying Machine,’” she declaimed solemnly. And very solemnly, but with now and then a punctuation point of giggle, she recited in its entirety the absurd classic which has played no inconspicuous part in the transatlantic curriculum. Her beautiful Creole voice, now pathetic and velvet, now lifted as the wing of a bird in flight, her face dimpling till even Stephen was bewitched, and Latham could have kissed it, and might have been tempted to essay the enterprise had only they been alone. Richard Bransby, whose fond fancy had compared the women of his love each to some distinct flower, might have thought her like some rich magnolia of her own South as she swayed and postured in the gleaming firelight. But perhaps all beautiful women are rather flower-like.
She ended the performance with a shiver and sigh of elation. “Oh, isn’t it a love of a poem? Have some more tea.”
Stephen came to see Mrs. Hilary not infrequently. She liked him genuinely, and her liking soothed and helped him. He was terribly restless often. Never once had he repented. He had loved Hugh, and loved him still. He would have given a great deal to have known where he was, and to have helped him. He would have given far more to know that the brother would never come back—come back to thwart him of Helen—perhaps to expose him of crime. He loved Hugh and he mourned him; but two things to him were paramount: to make Helen his wife, and to be an “Air-King.” One goal was in sight, the other he could not, and would not, relinquish. And to gain these two great desires, soul-desires both, he would hesitate at nothing, regret nothing, and least of all their cost to any other, no matter how dear to him that other, no matter how terrible that cost.
Latham left a few moments after the tragic descent of Darius into the barnyard mud. Angela Hilary went to the door to speed her parting guest, and gave him her hand, her right hand, of course. Latham dropped it rather abruptly and took her left hand in his. “How many rings do you own?” he demanded.
“Dozens. I’ve not counted them for years. There’s a list somewhere.”
“You need two more,” he said softly—and went.
The jade Joss had the room to himself. There was little enough light and no fire. Gray shadows hung thick in the place, palpable and dreary. The blinds were down and the curtains all drawn. It was late afternoon in January—a cold, forbidding day; and the room itself, once the heart of the house, was even colder, more ghoul-like. Only one or two thin shafts of sickly light crept in, penetrating the gloom—but not lifting it, intensifying it rather.
Joss looked cold, neglected and alien. The rose-colored lotus looked pinched, gray and frozen—poor exiled pair, and here and so they had been since a few days after Richard Bransby’s death, when Helen had left the room, locking it behind her, and pronounced it taboo to all others.
But now a key turned in the door, creaking and stiffly, as if long unused to its office.
In the hall, Mrs. Leavitt drew back with a shiver and motioned imperatively to Stephen to precede her. “How dark it is,” she said, and not very bravely, following him in not ungingerly.
“Yes,” he answered crisply. He had not come there to talk. And, like her, he was intensely nervous; but from a very different cause. Dead men, and the places of their last earthly resting, meant nothing to him.
“And cold. Stephen, light the fire while I draw the curtains. Have you matches?”
“Of course.” He knelt at the fireplace and set a match to the gas logs. Mrs. Leavitt drew the curtain aside and raised the blinds. The winter sunlight came streaming through the windows, a chilled unfriendly sunshine, but it flooded the room. Pryde looked about quickly, and the woman did too.
She was much affected. “Oh, Stephen, how this room does bring it all back to me! It seems as if it were only yesterday that Richard was here—poor Richard.” Then her eyes caught their old prey—dust—and dust—dust everywhere. She pulled open a drawer under the bookshelves and caught up a little feather duster that had always been kept there.
But Stephen checked her abruptly. “Don’t touch that table—don’t touch anything on any of the tables,” he said sharply.
“Well, I’m sure——”
“No—you must not. I—I promised Helen——”
“Promised Helen?”
“That no one should lay hand on even one thing, no one but myself, and that I would touch as little as possible—just to find the papers.”
“Well, I’m sure——”
His eye fell upon the bit of jade and he pointed to it, laughing nervously. “Especially, I had to promise her that I’d not lay a finger on that. You remember how Uncle Dick used absent-mindedly to play with it. And Helen declares that no one shall ever touch it again but herself, and she only to dust it.”
“Well, it needs dusting now, right enough,” Mrs. Leavitt remarked resentfully.
“Are you quite sure that everything here is exactly as Uncle Dick left it?” In spite of himself he could not keep his hideous anxiety out of his voice.
But Mrs. Leavitt did not notice. She was looking furtively about the unkempt room with disapproving eyes. She answered mechanically, “Oh—yes—everything. The day Richard’s coffin was carried out of it, Helen locked it up herself, just as it was. It has never been opened since.”
“She didn’t disturb any of the papers on this table?”
“No.”
“And no one has been here since, you are sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she replied acidly. “If I refused you, my own nephew, admission twenty times at least, I wouldn’t allow any one else in, would I? Helen said, before she went up to town to live because she couldn’t bear to stay here, poor child—it’s very lonely without her—well, she said that she did not want any one to come in here until she returned. Naturally I respected her wishes—orders, you might call them, since this is her house now—not that I grudge that. Well, now you come with this letter from her, saying that you are to do what you like in the library, and are to have her father’s keys—so of course I opened it for you—and glad enough to get it opened at last—and here are the keys; it’s only recently I’ve had them. Helen kept them herself for a long time.”
Stephen took them from her quickly—almost too quickly, had she been a woman observant of anything but dust and disorder. “I persuaded her to write it,” he said. “It is time her father’s papers were looked over, and it would be too heavy a task for her—too sad.”
“Stephen, is she still grieving over Hugh’s disappearance?”
Pryde shrugged his shoulders. “H’m, yes.”
“Poor child—poor child! It seems as if everything were taken from her at once. And to think that a nephew of mine—well, nearly a nephew—should desert from the army, and in war time, too—that there should be a warrant out for his arrest! Just do look at that dust!”
Stephen’s patience was wearing thin. “If you’ll excuse me now, Aunt Caroline——”
“Of course—you have a great deal to do, and I have too; the servants get worse and worse. Servants! They’re not servants; war impostures, I call them. Well, I’ll leave you now.” But at the door she turned again. “Stephen!”
“Yes.” He tried not to say it too impatiently.
“There isn’t anything of great value in this room, is there?”
“Why, no,” he said nervously.
“That’s odd.”
“Why—odd?” His voice was tense, and he did not look at her.
“Three times since Richard died, burglars have tried to force their way through the windows in this room.”
“Oh!” Pryde managed to say, and it was all he could manage to say.
“Always the same windows, you understand. Each time, fortunately, we frightened them away.”
“You have reported the matter to the police?” The anxiety made his voice husky.
“Yes, but all they ever did was to make notes.”
“You have no idea who the burglar was? Burglars, I mean,” correcting himself awkwardly. “You never caught sight of him—them?”
“No—not a glimpse.”
“No—oh, just some tramp, I dare say.”
He was easier now, but his voice was a little unsteady from strain and with relief. “And now please——”
“Yes, I’ll hurry away now. Barker is dusting the best dinner service—if I’m not there to watch, she’s sure to break something. Call me, if you want me.”
“I shan’t want you, Aunt Caroline.”
As the fussy, bustling footsteps died away Stephen sank into an easy-chair—Richard’s own, as it chanced—and laid his head on a table. He was worn out with tension and uncertainty.
The tall clock in the corner had run down. The gas fire made no sound. No room could have been stiller.
The day was mending toward its close, and the late level sun flooded in from the windows, as if to make up for lost time and eight months of exclusion. The light of the fire lit up the room’s other side, and between the two riots of light and of warmth the man sat dejected, distraught and shivering—alone with his self-knowledge, his fear and his gruesome task.
Where was the damnatory sheet of paper? In this room in all human probability. Its ink had scarcely dried when Bransby had died, and it had not been found on the body; Stephen Pryde had made sure of that.
For eight terrible months he had schemed and tortured to get here and find it—even playing housebreaker in his desperation. Yet now here at long last he shrank inexplicably from beginning the search. Why? That he knew not in the least. But, for one thing, he was hideously cold, almost cramped with chill. The arms of the chair felt like ice. Little billows of cold seemed to buffet against his face. The room had been shut up and fireless for so long. His feet ached with cold, almost they felt paralyzed. His legs were quivering, and so cold! And his hands were blueing.
At last he forced his numb frame from the seat.
He looked about with frightened, agonized eyes.
No paper lay on any one of the tables apparently. The wastepaper basket! He seized it with a hand that shook as if palsied. Oh—a crumpled whiteness lay on the bottom of the basket. Pray Heaven—he thrust in a fumbling hand—and gave a cry of disappointment. This was not paper, but some bit of soft cloth. He jerked it out impatiently, and then, when he saw what it was, dropped it on the table with a sharp sigh; a handkerchief—Helen’s.
From table to table he went, examining each article on them, searching every crevice. Each drawer he searched again and again. He looked in every possible place, and, as the anxious searchers for lost things have from time immemorial, in many impossible places. He overlooked nothing—he was sure of that. Again and again he searched the tables and then researched them.
With a puzzled frown he rose and stared about the room. Then he moved about it slowly and carefully, looking for some possible hidden cupboard. He sounded the wainscoting. He scrutinized the ceiling, he pulled at the seats of the chairs.
Finally he halted before the bookcase and stood staring at it a long time. He drew out one or two volumes. Could the thin sheet be behind one? But the dust came out thickly, and he put them back. Something seemed to pull him away, and drive him back to the table. Why, of course, it must be there. Where else would the dead man have hidden it? Nowhere, of course. Why waste time looking anywhere else? Again he began the weary business all over. Again and again his cold, trembling hands felt and searched, and his eyes, wild now and baffled, peered and studied. Almost he prayed. His breath came in gasps. Sweat stood on his forehead and around his clenched lips.
Nothing! Nowhere! He sank back in his seat, convinced and defeated. The confession was not here; or, if it was, he could not find it. And itmightbe somewhere else. Probably it had been destroyed, intentionally or accidentally, by some one else. But itmightbe in existence. And some day it might be found to damn and to ruin.
How tired he was—and how cold! Why couldn’t he get warmer? And where did those icy drifts of wind come from, goose-fleshing his face and his hands and making his spine creep?
He crouched over the fire, and held out his blue hands to its heat. No use! He was growing colder and colder.
Then he began in his groping misery to think of birds flying. That was always his vision in moments of over-tension or of great aspiration—birds in full flight. To watch such flight had been the purest joy of his boyhood. To contrive and to achieve its emulation had been the fight and the triumph of his manhood.
He lifted the morsel of cambric to his face, saluting it, and wiping away with it the cold moisture on his cheek and his lips. Who should say his extraordinary ambition, extraordinarily pursued, extraordinarily fulfilled, ignoble? No one quite justly. Certainly he had wanted success, power, prestige and great wealth for himself. But, as much as he had desired them for himself, no less had he desired them for Helen—to lay at her feet, to keep in her hands.
And, too, he had dreamed to make England mightier yet by his air fleets and their victories. Patriotism is a virtue enhanced and embellished by all other virtues, even as it enhances and embellishes all other virtues. But it is a virtue sole and apart, and not impossible to hearts and to lives in all else besotted and ignoble. Only yesterday Stephen himself had seen an example of this. Waiting at Victoria, he had watched some hundreds of German prisoners detrained and retrained. As they sat waiting and guarded, a bunch of English convicts, manacled and pallid, had slouched on to the platform—“old timers” of the worst type, from their looks, with heads ill-shaped and shapeless, more appropriate to an asylum for idiots than a prison for miscreants, and with countenances that would have disgraced and branded the lowest form of quadruped brute life—“men” compared with whom, unless their appearance grossly libeled them, Bill Sykes must have been quite the gentleman and no little of an Adonis. But not one of them all, bestial, hardened and deficient, but slunk or weakly brazened as they shuffled along, ashamed and unnerved, abashed of God’s daylight and of the glance of their unincarcerated fellows. Among them was chained one boy (he was scarcely older than that) with a fine head and a gifted face—a boy, not unlike what Stephen remembered himself in his unscorched days. It was a spiritual face even now, as Stephen’s own was. Probably the boy’s crime had been some sin of passion. Murderers often are of the spiritual type, but very rarely housebreakers or thugs. Perhaps he had murdered a brother, loved by the girl he himself craved. Perhaps he had killed some enemy or friend who well deserved such slaughter. Or had his guilt been more sordid, begotten in some schoolboy escapade, growing and nourished fœtuslike in the fructive womb of youth’s temptations and young manhood’s cowardice: money misused, trust betrayed, sex tarnished? Whatever his crime it had left no scar on his face, no record except of suffering. And of them all, this young convict’s plight was the most pitiful, his chagrin the most woeful, of all that sorry gang. At a word from a warder, they turned their poor cropped heads and saw the Hun prisoners. The cravened faces cleared, the handcuffed figures straightened, the haggard, clouded eyes brightened, the broken gait mended; criminals, exhibited in their hideous livery of shame, for the moment they were men once more—Englishmen, belligerent, proud and rejoiced—of the race of the victors, lifted out and above the slime of their personal defeat—all of them, the oldest and most beast-like, and the boy with the finely chiseled face and the heart-broken eyes.
Stephen Pryde’s own eyes, as he sat brooding between the fire and the sunshine, were as haggard as any of those cinnamon-clad miserables had been. He was ill—with the inexplicable chill, the grave-smell of the room, and the nausea of disappointment and of his dilemma. He was at bay indeed now.
But the face that hung over the fire was a spiritual face. He had betrayed a trust. He had stolen. He had borne false witness. In this very room he had knotted his fist to do murder—and against the man who had given him home, affection, position and luxury; and against his own brother, whose mother and his had placed their hands palm in palm when death already had muted her lips—his kiddy brother!—he had sinned with a sin and a dastardy, compared to which Cain’s was venial and kind. Why? And having so sinned, why was his face still fine, the hallmark of the spiritual type still stamped there, clear and unblurred?
Ah, who shall say? The riddle is dense.
Perhaps ’twas because his vice was indeed “but virtue misapplied,” because circumstances had betrayed him. Mary Magdalene in her common days probably had some foretelling of saintship on her lureful face, and might more easily have nursed babes on her breast than lured men to her lair, been mother more gladly than wanton.
However it was, however it came, there was a high something, a fineness, on Stephen Pryde’s face that no one else of his milieu had—not even Helen, certainly not Hugh; but his, for all time, to descend with him into the grave, to go with him wherever he went, Heavenward or Hellward—his gift and his birth-right. Few indeed ever sensed this. Spirituality was almost the last trait friends or relatives would have attributed to him. But one acquaintance had espied it—the American woman, whom he had held in some sneering tolerance in the days of their first meeting. “He has the face of a saint—a sour saint—but a saint, a soul apart,” Angela had said of him the day he had been introduced to her. And he had said of her after the same occasion, “What a preposterous rattle of a woman! She rushes from whim to absurdity, back and forth and getting nowhere—‘cluck, cluck, cluck’—like a hen in front of a motor-car.” And this of the woman who had understood him at a glance, as his own people had not in a lifetime. Why? Another riddle. Perhaps it was because, underneath her cap and bells, Angela Hilary, too, wore the hallmark, smaller, lighter cut—but there, and the same. There is no greater mistake—and none made more often—than to think that those who laugh and dance through life are earthbound. Heaven is full of little children, clustered at her knee, playing with Our Lady’s beads.
After Stephen, dreamer and sinner, Angela Hilary had the most spiritual of all the personalities with which this tale is concerned; and, after her, the self-contained, conventional, well-groomed doctor of Harley Street.
Mrs. Leavitt’s step came along the hall, and her voice, upbraiding some domestic delinquency, ordering tea and toast.
With a shivering effort, Pryde rose from his seat, put the handkerchief away carefully—in his pocket, and strolled nonchalantly into the hall, closing the door behind him.
The jade Joss had the room to himself.
About noon the next day Helen motored from London and took them all by surprise.
Mrs. Leavitt was delighted. It was lonely at Deep Dale—very lonely sometimes. For the first time in his life Stephen was sorry to see his cousin. Her visit, he felt, foreboded no good to his momentary enterprise, and her presence could but be something of an entanglement. He was manager—dictator almost—at Cockspur Street, at the Poultry and at Weybridge, and could carry it off with some show of authority, and with some reality of it too. But here he was nothing, nobody. Helen was everything here. No one else counted. Her rule was gentle, but not Bransby’s own had been more autocratic or less to be swayed except by her own fancy or whim.
Only too well he knew how this home-coming would move her. What might she not order and countermand? Her permission to him to search and to docket had been scant and reluctant enough in London. Here, any instant she might rescind it. Above all he dreaded her presence in the library—both for its interference with his further searching (of course he had determined to search the already much-searched room again) and for the effect of the room and its associations upon her.
She had little to say to him, and almost he seemed to avoid her. But he ventured to follow her to the library the afternoon of her arrival—and he did it for her sake almost as much as for his own.
She was standing quietly looking about the well-loved room; and he could see that she was holding back her tears with difficulty. Almost he wished that she would not restrain them—though he liked to see a woman’s weeping as little as most men do—so drawn and set was her face.
“Who is it?” she asked presently.
“It’s I, Helen.”
She turned to him wearily—then turned to the table; he put out his hand to restrain her, but she did not see, or she ignored it, and took up the green and pink jade and wiped it carefully with her handkerchief. A strange rapt look grew in her face, as she pressed the cambric into the difficult crannies of the intricate, delicate carving. She sighed when she had finished, and put the little fetish down—very carefully, just where it had stood before.
“Is—is anything wrong, Helen?”
“No.”
“Then why are you here? You said you couldn’t come.”
“I know, but at the last minute I had to.”
“You had to?”
“Yes,” she answered wearily, seating herself on the broad window-seat. “Have you looked over Daddy’s papers?”
“Yes.”
“Have you found anything—anything—about Hugh?” The listless voice was keen and eager enough now.
“No—nothing,” he told her.
“Are you sure, Stephen?”
“Quite,” he said sadly. “Why, dear, what makes you think——”
“I don’t know—only—something told me——” She rose and came towards the writing-table. Stephen moved too, getting between her and it—“I felt—that we should find something here that would help us prove his innocence—that would bring him back to me.”
The man who loved her as neither Hugh nor Richard Bransby had, winced at the love and longing in the girl’s voice. But he answered her gently, “There is nothing here.” For a space he stood staring at the table, puzzled, thinking hard. “Helen.”
“Well?” she was back at the window now, looking idly out at the leafless, snow-crusted trees.
“Had Uncle Dick any secret cupboard or safe where he kept important papers?”
“No—you know he hadn’t. He always kept his important things at the office—you know that.”
“Then, if there was anything about Hugh here it would be on this table.”
“Yes.” But even at Hugh’s name she did not turn from the window, but still stood looking drearily out at the dreary day.
Perplexed and still more perplexed, Stephen stood motionless, gazing down on the writing-table. Suddenly a thought struck him. His face lit a little. The thought had possessed him now: a welcome thought. Surely the paper, the hideous paper, had fallen from the table on which his uncle had left it, fallen into the fire, and been burnt. He measured the distance with a kindling eye. Yes! Yes! It might have been that. Surely it had been that. It must be; it should be. Fascinated, he stood estimating the chances—again and again. Helen sighed and turned and came towards him slowly. He neither saw nor heard her. “That’s it. Yes, that’s it!” he exclaimed excitedly—triumphant, speaking to himself, not to Helen.
And, if Helen heard, she did not heed. After a little she came close to him and said beseechingly, “You don’t think there is any hope, do you, Stephen?”
He pulled himself together with a sharp effort—so sharp that it paled a little his face which had flushed slightly with his own relief of a moment ago. He took her hand gently. “I am sure there is not,” he told her sadly.
She left her hand in his for a moment—glad of the sympathy in his touch, then turned dejectedly away. “Poor Hugh!” she said as she moved. “Poor Hugh,” she repeated, slipping down on to the big couch.
Stephen Pryde followed her. “Helen,” he begged, “you mustn’t grieve like this—you must not torture yourself so by hoping to see Hugh again. You must put him out of your mind.” Her mother could not have said it more gently. He moved a light chair nearer the couch and sat down.
“I can’t,” she said simply.
He left his chair and sat down quietly beside her “Why won’t you let me help you? Why won’t you——”
The girl shrank back into her corner. “Don’t, Stephen—please. We’ve gone all through this before. It’s impossible.”
“But Hugh is unworthy of you. Oh!”—at a quick gesture from her—“don’t misunderstand me. I love Hugh—love him still—always shall——” There was the ring of sincerity in his voice, and indeed, so far, he had said but the truth. “Day in and day out I go over it all in my mind, and at night, and try to find some possible loophole for hope, hope of his innocence. But there is none. And then the deserting! But I’d do anything for Hugh—anything. And I’d give all I have, or ever hope to have, to clear him. I shall always stick to him, if ever he comes back, and in my heart at least, if he doesn’t. But you—oh! Helen—to waste all your young years, spill all your thought and all your caring—I can’t endure that—for your own sake—if my love and my longing are nothing to you—I implore you—he has proved himself unworthy—acknowledged it even——”
“Daddy loved him—even when the trouble came—and I know he would want me to help him—if I could.”
“Helen,” Stephen said after a short pause, speaking in a low even voice (really he was managing himself splendidly—heroically), “you want to do everything that your father wished, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. You know that.”
“After Hugh left that night, Uncle Dick told me that it would make him happy to think that—some day—you and I would be married——”
The last words were almost a whisper, so gently he said them. But, for all his care, they stabbed her.
“Stephen!——” It was a cry and a protest.
The smooth voice went on, “He knew that I had always cared for you, and that you would be safe with me. He would have told you had he lived. He meant to——”
Never was wooing quieter. But the room pulsed about him, perhaps she felt it throb too, so intense and so true was his passion, so crying his longing.
“You have never told me this—before——” she began, not unmoved.
“No, dear, I didn’t want to worry you. And I—I wanted it to come from you—the gift—of yourself. I wanted to teach you to love me—unaided. But I couldn’t—so I turned to him—to Uncle Dick to help me—as I always turned to him for everything from the day mother died. Oh, Helen, can’t you, won’t you, don’t you see how I love you? I have always loved you.”
“Please—not now——” Her face was very white. “I can’t talk to you now. I must have time—to think—we—we can talk—another time.” She got up unsteadily and moved to the door.
He opened it simply, and made not even a gesture to delay her.
Alone—he breathed a long sigh of mingled feelings. There was satisfaction in it—and other things, satisfaction that she was no longer here in this danger zone of his where the confessionmightbe after all, and might be found at any moment to confront and undo him. And there was satisfaction too that he had come a little nearer prosperity in his hard wooing than he had ever come before. She had not repulsed him—not at least as she had done before. Perhaps—perhaps—he would win her yet—and—if he did—if he did!
Standing by the table he rested his hand there, and it just brushed the piece of jade. He drew his hand back quickly. Helen had desired that no one but she herself should ever touch it again. Not for much would he have disobeyed her in this small thing. Her every wish was law to Stephen Pryde, except only when some wish of hers threatened his two great passions.
The paper—the cursed paper—must have gone to cinder. Surely it had been so. He searched a drawer and found notepaper—and made a sheet to the size—as he remembered it—of the missing piece. He laid it on the table, brushed it off with a convulsive motion of his arm. Brief as his instant of waiting was, it trembled his lip with suspense. Thank God! Thank God! The paper had fallen on to the glowing asbestos. It caught. It burned. It was gone—absolutely obliterated—destroyed as if it had never been.
He sank down into Richard Bransby’s chair, and began to laugh. Long and softly the hysterical laughter of his relief—sadder than any sobbing—crept and shivered through the room.
The green Joss blinked and winked in the flickering of the high-turned fire. The pink jade lotus grew redder in the crimson laving of the setting sun.
Of course any feeling of security built upon so slight foundation, and concerning a matter of such paramount and vital moment, could but be transient. With the next daylight, dread and anxiety reasserted themselves. And Pryde was again the victim of restlessness and uncertainty.
Helen’s presence, her nearness to the library all the time, and her actual occupation of it whenever she chose, disconcerted him. He hoped that she would go back to Curzon Street almost at once. Anxious as he was to go over his feverish searching again and still again, he would eagerly have turned the key in the library door, and taken her back to London, deferring for a few days what he again believed and hoped would be the result and the reward of yet one more hunt. It had been great relief to feel that the deadly document was already destroyed. It would be a thousandfold more comfort to see it burn—and ten thousand times more satisfactory. He shouldknowthen. He couldneverknow else. He should be free and unafraid then. In no other way could he ever attain unalloyed freedom, in no other way escape the rough clutch of fear.
But Helen had come to Oxshott to stay—for the present. And on the second day Pryde learned to his annoyance that she was expecting Dr. Latham by an afternoon train.
Well, what would be would be, more especially if Helen had decreed it, and he accepted the physician’s appearance with a patient shrug—as patient a shrug as he could muster.
It naturally fell to him to act host to this man guest of Helen’s, and he liked Latham more than he liked most men, and resented his intrusion as little as he could any one’s, unless Angela Hilary might have come in the doctor’s stead. Angela would have played the better into his hands, by the shrill claim she would have made upon Helen with a chatter of frocks and a running hither and thither. And, too, he had come to enjoy Mrs. Hilary quite apart from any usefulness to be wrung from the vibrant personality. He enjoyed the breeze of it, and often turned into her hotel as other overworked and brain-fagged men run down to Brighton or Folkestone for a day of relaxation, and the tonic sea-air. He had come to find positive refreshment in occasional whiffs of her saline sparkle, and no little diversion in speculating as to what she would say next, and about what. And this of the woman of whom he had once said that she and her inconsequent chatter of kaleidoscope nonsenses reminded him of nothing but the wild fluttings and distraught flutterings of a hen in front of a motor! Truly with him she was an acquired taste. But as truly he had acquired it. He had come more nearly to know her—her as she was, as well as her as she seemed. Many people acquired that taste—when they came to more know the blithe alien—and not a few felt it instinctively at the first of acquaintance.
But Angela Hilary was not here, and Horace Latham was—and Pryde did his best to make the latter’s visit pleasant, but without the slightest effort or wish to prolong it.
“Do you know, Pryde,” Latham said musingly, as they smoked together after dinner—alone for the moment in the library—“it always puzzled me——”
“Puzzled you?”
“I have so often wondered about it—it came so suddenly—Bransby’s death. As a physician I could not just understand it then, and I have never been quite able to understand it since. And as a physician—I’d like to. It’s been rather like losing track of the end of a case you’ve been at particular pains to diagnose. It’s unsatisfactory.”
“I don’t quite see——”
“It must have been a shock that killed him—a great shock.” Latham’s voice and manner were the manner and voice of his consulting-room. He was probing—kindly and easily—but probing skillfully. Pryde felt it distinctly. “Did he, by any chance, know that your brother intended to desert?”
“No—I don’t think so.” Stephen was well on his guard. “But he knew that Hugh was in some trouble at the office. That was why Grant came here that night.”
“Oh, yes,” Latham nodded. “I remember. No, it wasn’t that. His interview with Grant disturbed him, I know—but it was something bigger that killed him!”
“Why, how—how do you mean?” Stephen spoke as naturally as he could.
“You were the last person who saw him alive, were you not?” Latham questioned for question.
“Yes.”
“How was he when you left him—when you said good-night?”
“He was all right,” Pryde spoke reflectingly.
“If my memory serves me,” the physician continued, “you had gone from the house.”
“When he died? Yes—some time before he died. I was on my way to London. There was something Uncle Dick wanted me to do for him in town—er it was nothing important.”
“Then,” Latham added musingly, “it was after you left that this shock occurred to him. It must have come from something in this room.”
“Something in this room?” Strive as he might, and he strove his utmost, Stephen could not keep the sharp agitation he felt out of his voice.
But Latham did not notice it—or did not appear to. “Yes,” he said in his same level voice, “a letter—some papers. Was anything of importance found on his table?”
“Nothing.”
“Curious!”
Pryde, fascinated by his own device and his hope, the device born of the hope, was lost in thought, and sat looking from table to fire, measuring again with his trained eyes distance and angles. And, seeing the other’s absorption, Latham was watching him openly now, with eyes also well trained, and, because less anxious, probably shrewder. The physician was diagnosing.
Stephen spoke first. Latham had intended that he should. “Latham?”
“Yes?”
“If you were right,” rising in his tense interest,—“if there had been some papers that caused the shock that killed him—isn’t it possible”—returning to his chair as suddenly as he had quit it—“isn’t it probable that while he had it in his hand, sitting just here perhaps, he tried to rise, he was faint and tried to reach the bell, and the paper fell from his hand, fell into the fire and was destroyed?” As he spoke he enacted, rising, turning ineffectually, convulsively toward the bell, let an imaginary paper drift from his hand. Then he caught the significance of his own excitement, ruled himself, and sauntered to the fireplace.
But the diagnosis was completed. “I dare say that might have happened,” Latham said consideringly.
“It’s the only way I can explain it,” Pryde’s voice vibrated with his infinite relief.
“Explain what, Pryde?” Latham asked in his Harley Street voice. To the insinuation of that deft tone many a patient had yielded a secret unconsciously.
But Stephen recalled himself, and was on his guard again. “Why—why—this sudden death.” A slight smile just flicked the physician’s serene face. Pryde rose once more and stood again gazing, half hypnotized by his own suggestion. “It was a great blow to me, Latham, a great blow”—a sigh, so sharp that it seemed to shake him, ended his sentence. “I torture myself trying to picture just what happened after I left this room.”
Latham made no reply. Presently Pryde spoke again, repeating his own words rather wildly. “Torture myself trying to picture just what happened after I left this room.”
Still Latham said nothing. He was considering.